


Gently

by Kiyaar



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Fluff, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, M/M, Short, Sickfic, The flu, bronchitis, but actually.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 17:38:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16769773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar
Summary: Previously on tumblr! A little bit of sickfic featuring A HIGH FEVER and tender loving Steve.





	Gently

**Author's Note:**

> I know. Who even am I.

Sleep passes in fitful bursts and the sheets stick and cling to Tony’s legs. The humidifier is hissing somewhere off to his left, and the lights are a dim fade at two percent. He coughs and his throat burns.

Everything smells sour and stale, menthol laid over days of grime.

His entire body jerks when one of Steve’s massive hands comes to his forehead and ends up covering half of his face.

“Muh,” Tony tries, and his head drops back to the pillow. He’s vaguely aware of his mouth hanging open, of the sweat beading down his face. He feels like a furnace. His tongue feels like cotton. He’s desperately thirsty, but getting up seems an impossible feat. The bathroom is twenty impassable feet away.

“You’re way too hot,” Steve murmurs, and strokes a hand up Tony’s side. “Hey. Tony.”

“I took stuff,” Tony mumbles. “At seven. Can’t take more yet.” He tries to roll over onto his stomach and ends up rolling into Steve instead. Steve is both an immovable wall and a space heater. Tony lays his head on Steve’s chest and feels wretched.

“I’m gonna take you to the E.R.,” Steve says, and he’s swiping something cool and hard across Tony’s forehead. Tony drools on his chest. Up, down, thirty-five perfectly steady beats per minute. His own heart feels comically loud in the quiet of his bedroom where it thrums wildly in his chest. His blood pressure must be astronomical. He imagines his blood cells rushing through their barriers.

“I’m ok,” Tony says absently, and feels around until he hits the bare skin of Steve’s stomach. “Just hot.”

Steve sighs, and shifts. It takes Tony an absurdly long time to realize Steve is holding a thermometer in front of his face. “I can’t read that,” he says into Steve’s t-shirt. It blurs before his eyes. “You smell like laundry.”

“It says 105.1. You’re going to the E.R.”

“Close the window,” Tony says, and Steve’s warmth leaves. He should say something. No or water or something’s wrong.

“Can you fly the car back,” Steve is saying, and Tony feels like he could sink into the mattress forever, so long as his chest is still and his lungs take in shallow bursts of the warm humid mist spewing into the room. He just has to not move. “…no, he hasn’t, I’ll just take him to Cornell. Can you call Reed?”

Tony feels blindly around for the blanket Steve’s left abandoned on his side of the bed and starts to cough. And coughs. And coughs. 

“Ok, hey, you’re ok,” Steve says, as Tony’s entire body seizes again. Steve sounds distressed, and Tony wants to tell him it’s ok, it’ll stop. But it doesn’t stop, he just coughs and coughs and something gurgles deep in his chest when he finally stops long enough to suck in a breath.

Steve eases him out of his filthy sheets, rolls his six feet of sweat-soaked body into enormous burly arms. He shivers. “Close the window,” Tony slurs. “Cold.” His body shakes and there’s nothing he can do, and he’s so cold, he has to get closer. He has to get back in bed. He has to sleep. He wheezes and presses his stubbly face into Steve’s arm. His hair is plastered to his forehead. He aches.

Steve gathers him, hoists him effortlessly into his arms as if Tony might as well be a child. Steve is muttering instructions that Tony can’t parse, but it doesn’t matter, nothing matters as much as the furnace of him against Tony’s shaking body, nothing is as soothing as his stubbly cheek pressed into the slope of Steve’s shoulder.

“…admit you. I called Rhodey,” Steve’s mouth is saying. Tony doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but a rush of gratefulness wells up in him. No one has done this for him, ever. He’s never known how to ask for this. By rights, he shouldn’t have this.

This is for other people. 

“Sorry,” Tony slurs.

Steve hitches him up with tenderness incongruous with his mass. He nudges Tony’s head into the crook of his neck.

“I’m not,” he says, and presses his lips to Tony’s forehead. 

**Author's Note:**

> rebloggable tumblr post [here.](http://kiyaar.tumblr.com/post/110293826733/anon-asked-for-gentle-stevetony-anon)
> 
> [on twitter](https://twitter.com/besafesteve)  
> [on tumblr](https://kiyaar.tumblr.com)


End file.
